Systems thinking, control charts and philosophy

Spent an interesting few hours on the 29th May at a meeting of the ‘north of england transformation network’ meeting in Brighouse, West Yorkshire – www.net2.org.uk – thanks for the invite, folks!

Bizarrely, the talk by Dr Mark Wilcox entitled ‘Predicting performance – our debt to Shewhart’ was a fascinating journey through the sources of thought in both Shewart and Deming and brought up Heraclitus who I mentioned in an earlier item. Mark was relating the link with the philosophical school of Pragmatism, popular in the USA in the early 20th century, along with A.N.Whitehead. It appears that both Shewhart and Deming had read C.I.Lewis’s book ‘Mind and the World Order‘ on multiple occasions. Since Shewart was originator of the control chart, which is a fundamental aspect of systems thinking, hearing the part various other authors helped to play in its development demonstrated to me how it all came together and was still developing.

I also tested out my theory, that dissatisfaction would make a suitable metric for customer service in local government despite my inability to express it as a variation, without any serious disputes with some of the other attendees.

Perhaps some things are becoming clearer to me, if they weren’t before?

Those seeking to improve services before, since and during the e-government era, continue to do so!

Whilst seeing better ways of doing things, they might have failed to join up in a crusade against the promoters of targets (in practice) but are able to be joined up quite nicely around the theory.

Why I’m taken with this is that the promoters of lean thought argue for the sorting out of processes initially with the customer involved, then we do the IT stuff!

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About me

The blogger is Mick Phythian, a Research Associate at De Montfort University in Leicester, U.K. and former ICT Manager at Ryedale District Council in North Yorkshire, England. He was also a founder member of the Local CIO Council and regional Chair of Socitm.

Any opinions expressed on this weblog are purely those of the author.

He is not the Great Emancipator! The Great Emancipator was President Abraham Lincoln. The blog is so-called because some people perceive e-government, transformational government or, heaven forbid, government to be the emancipator of us all...